Dear Friend of Heartwork,
In the spirit of this year's Heartwork focus on "Letting Go," I am sending out weekly quotes that relate to the topic. I hope that you will be touched by them in some significant way.
Blessings on your journey,
Dale
Facing Death (by Greg Mayers, Zen Teacher and Catholic Priest)
The big problem we can't get around is death. No matter how we think about it, it remains unsolvable; causing us anxiety, stealing creativity, depressing our enthusiasm for living. No matter what we do in life, death finally grins at us in the end.
But death is not as unfamiliar as we think. We die all the time. Each night when we fall asleep, we loose all the familiar details of our daily living and enter into a deep dreamless sleep where there is... nothing. Not only this, but each moment slips away from us and all its little details with it.
So, the "Heart Sutra" a Zen text, says that there is "...no ending of old age and death." This moment grows old and dies. This day grows old and dies. And we sleep at night. But the next moment comes with all its details, and the next day comes with its particulars, and we awaken in the morning... So, the same sutra says that "in emptiness there is... no old age and death."
Everything changes all the time, but "one thing" never, ever changes for it is not in time. And you are essentially, fundamentally, irrevocably that. And "that" as the sutra says is "not born, not destroyed... transforming all suffering and distress."
Our practice is a practice of dying moment to moment, of letting go moment to moment until we discover that which we can never let go of, because we never hold on to it. We discover what never, ever ends, because it never, ever begins. Thus we are free to live life with "no hindrance... and therefore no fear."